


i eat men like air, and swallow blood like dust

by winterbones



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, greek mythology feels, triangle not three somes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 18:14:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterbones/pseuds/winterbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>oh helen, look at all you have wrought. greek gods au.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i eat men like air, and swallow blood like dust

**Author's Note:**

> prompt fic. lydia, derek, and stiles as greek gods. a triangle, not a threesome.

Lydia hates that saying _wars have been fought over less_ , because she knows they are thinking of the Trojan Walls, beaten and shattered, fed to the hungry sea, swallowed up callously and carelessly. She _hates_ that saying because there is never a better reason to go to war, then for a woman. Love goes hand in hand with carnage, because the heart is a bloody, vile little thing. She’d held one in her palm once, a parishioner come to her pool. He hadn’t been interesting, then, just another man but he’d been driven so _mad_ for love of her and had ripped his own heart from his chest, dropped the heavy, sticky organ into her pool. From her seat on Olympus, she’d scooped it up and held it, the blood like sap worming down her fingers. She’s been fascinated.

Derek had turned his head away in disgust. “You take a pleasure in causing them their torment?”

She had laughed. “I take pleasure in how they torment themselves. He had a wife, and she is very lovely, but he had her so, of course, he did not want her. That’s the way of men.” She had paused, tapping one bloody finger against her chin. “Perhaps I’ll give her a lover. It’s not fair that she should suffer for sake of him.”

Derek had left her there, mouth twisted in a sneer, but Lydia had felt his eyes upon the spot where her legs tucked up into her chiton, and had smiled. She kept the heart, as a prize.

Stiles is younger, though Lydia would not go as far to say more innocent. She had watched him from her pools before Zeus had scooped him up; the way he had toyed with the mortals, twisting them around and around, trapped in a web of his wires, pulling it out so tightly they were severed at the legs. She had known before he did, that he would want her.

And that is the problem. She is wanted, passionately and lustfully and without reservations, without disgust of what she is and what she does, by Stiles. So she does not want him. She wants Derek, with his dark, judging eyes and critical mouth just begging to be kissed with tongue and teeth. She does, bites him as much as she kisses him, and revels in knowing how much he doesn’t _want_ to enjoy it. She lets him take her by her pool, her fingers dipping down into the water, scenes swirling before her eyes, hazing from her lust and the water’s ripples. It feels like a victory when he comes, cursing breathing at the small of her back.

“He wants you,” Derek accuses, hand curling over her neck. Lydia only offers him a kittenish smile, knees braces against the marble of her fountain.

“Oh, yes. Oh yes, he does,” she murmurs lowly, voice husky from sex, from the way his fingers move over her breasts, down to junction of her thighs. War is what carves into Derek’s bones, and he does understand carnage and blood but only in a stunted, malformed way—he doesn’t understand the real purity of it, he doesn’t under the offering of it, he only understands taking and taking and _taking_ and that’s why Lydia never, ever gives herself; he always needs to take.

His breath hisses harshly from his broad chest, hips slapping into hers, punishing and bruising. “You’ll destroy him.”

She laughs, laughs until her breath catches in her throat from the ferocity of his thrusts. “Do not think I do not know how to war, Derek. My trophies are hearts, not heads.”

Later, roping her hair behind her back, she finds Stiles not far from her pool, head bowed and body curled against the pillar winded with golden laurels. She almost feels a stuttering of guilt, but remembers—she never asked him to love her, never wanted him except in her quiet, most selfish moments—and decides not to feel sorry.

“Do you love him?” Stiles asks.

“This is a messy thing,” Lydia says. “Messier than any war, I think. And when all the bodies have been burned, who’s to say what’s left?”

 _Fly away,_ Lydia thinks, _Zeus gave you swift feet for a reason_. But she does not, because she knows he will not.

She’s not surprised that Allison descends on her soon after, eyes alight with prophecy. Her slender, thin fingers grasp at Lydia’s elbow, her dark hair wild. There was a girl like her once, down in a city a woman wrecked, and Allison had turned sour and bitter when her brother favored her better than she. But Scott’s love was no lighter than another’s and the immortal prophecies that branded her a witch had driven the girl to toss herself from the highest wall. Allison had swallowed what was left of her up, so Scott might love her better.

Sometimes, Allison is a fool. Sometimes Lydia is too.

“Do you know what’s going to happen?” she hisses, tongue snaking out over her teeth. Lydia wants to ask if she has that mad girl’s soul, wedged into herself, curled up like some underdeveloped fetus, left to rot and decay inside her. But even she is not that cruel. “What you have done?”

Lydia only wants to laugh. “I have done? I do not ask them to war for me, for my favor. They think me a prize to be won, more fools them.” She smiles now, and it is a monstrous thing. Love always is. “If they would rip out their hearts and place them into my hands, why should I not take them as mine?”

She leaves Allison there, to stew, and leaves bloody footprints as she walks, already tasting the death of so many gods on her tongue, a tart, half-bitter thing. Lydia knows a secret, because once she had peered into her pool where a woman had looked down at a city wrecked, a city that looked upward to her and lifted a finger as if to say _surely this is your fault, for you are so beautiful, and these bodies we lay at your feet, you are a far better conqueror than any come to us._

“Oh, Helen,” the woman had whispered, and Lydia had stroked a finger down her visage, tasting her sorrow and her grief, and her joy. Her smile had been grotesque in its beauty. There is no general more ruthless, more callous, than love. “Look at all you have wrought.”

Will Lydia repeat a similar sentiment, when her dainty sandaled feet trod cities and men and armies into dust? No, Lydia thinks, she won’t. She’s never been so archaic.


End file.
